80 Femtocomputing

by Roger M. Wilcox

Back in the heyday of the TRS-80 (the end of the 1970s through the early
1980s), there were a few magazines published for TRS-80 enthusiasts. And when
I say "magazines," I mean actual, slick pages made out of paper, bound together
at the spine, and sold through the mail (actual mail, not e-mail) and at
various computer-oriented retailers. These magazines usually featured ads for
professionally-produced TRS-80 software, articles on how to get the most out of
your TRS-80, tips for BASIC and assembly language programmers, and — and
this is the part that sounds hardest to believe today — program
listings.

Yes, listings of BASIC (and sometimes even machine language)
programs that you, the reader, were expected to type in by hand on your
own TRS-80. This was the dark ages before the dawning of the Internet, you see.
There were only 4 ways to send programs from one TRS-80 to another:

Connect both TRS-80s to a modem, at an agreed-upon phone number at an
agreed-upon time, and have one TRS-80 dial up the other;

Save the program to a 5¼-inch diskette and mail it;

Save the program data to an audio cassette and mail it; or

Print out the program listing and send it to the other person to type in
by hand.

Some TRS-80s didn't have a modem. Many didn't even have a diskette drive. The
keyboard and the cassette player were these TRS-80s' only input devices. It
was a lot cheaper to print up a program listing in thousands of copies of a
glossy magazine than it was to mass-duplicate a cassette. And so, receiving a
magazine in the mail containing a program listing for "Space Potatoes," and
typing each line in by hand — without making any mistakes — became
a way to while away your otherwise dull afternoon.

Well, one such TRS-80 magazine was named 80 Microcomputing. I loved
80 Microcomputing. I subscribed to it using my own money — which
for a lad of 15 or 16 meant a serious commitment. I pored over the articles
looking for ways to make the TRS-80 games I was trying to write even better.
And then, one fateful day, the July 1981 issue of 80 Microcomputing ran
a little joke article titled "News from Kitchen Table Software, Inc.".

That one little joke article changed my life. Or at least, it gave me an idea.
I decided to write a parody of 80 Microcomputing itself!

The results are archived here, for your perusal. Despite the fact that it was
only 1981, I decided to set them in the far-distant future year of 1984. By
then, the steady pace of technological advancement would surely have given us
such marvels as femtocomputers (clearly, a billion times smaller or
denser than microcomputers), version 87.4 of TRS-DOS (the TRS-80's disk
operating system), and compression algorithms that could squeeze all of
Colossal Cave adventure into a single byte.

I wrote three issues before I ran out of steam. Mind you, I was a 16-year-old
kid at the time, whose idea of a good time was memorizing pi to 200 digits.